In the bio-analytical field, up to now, there is a very severe need of identifying new diagnostic tools, and in particular particles to be used in applications for the detection, labelling and imaging of bio-molecules. It is nowadays also very urgent the need of making available new tools for treatments in phototherapy.
At the state of the art particles are known for drug delivery (for example A New Class Of Silica Cross-Linked Micellar Core-Shell Nanoparticles; Huo, Q.; Liu, J.; Wang, L. Q.; Jiang, Y.; Lambert, T. N.; Fang, E. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2006, 128(19), 6447-6453). This kind of particles are nevertheless hardly suitable for diagnostic applications (and/or phototherapy) since they are not engineered to target specific positions and they present a high tendency to release the drugs or active substances that they contain. The methods for the preparation of these particles are, moreover, in many cases very time demanding.
For what stated above one can gather that there is a great need of making available new particles and new methods for their preparation.